Cleverly eschews the gimmicks and comes out in front.

After four days at Conservative Party Conference, I reflect on the leadership candidates' speeches and look at how James Cleverly rejected presentational gimmickry to stand out from the crowd.

Since Attlee & Churchill is currently running a series of articles on Conservative leadership elections. You can read about the first ever Tory leadership election in 1965 here; the 1975 battle for the Tory crown here; and the 1989 challenge to Margaret Thatcher’s leadership here. In this post, we take a break from that series to look at the contest taking place now: the race to succeed Rishi Sunak.

Image: The Conservative Party

Cleverly eschews the gimmicks and comes out in front.

by Lee David Evans

For the first time in almost two decades, Conservative Party Conference met with one purpose in mind: the selection of a new leader. Nobody entering Birmingham’s International Convention Centre over the past four days could escape the contest. If a keen young campaign volunteer didn’t thrust a ‘Kemi’ sticker towards your lapel, they offered a ‘Cleverly’ lanyard for your neck. And the leadership was all anybody could talk about.

The precedent for this contest is 2005, when the party met in Blackpool to consider Michael Howard’s successor. Two speeches defined that race. The first was by the front-runner David Davis, which was uninspiring and flat and prompted The Daily Telegraph to label him ‘a robot in the headlights.’ The other was delivered by an MP with less than five years’ experience in the Commons, David Cameron. In a break from conference speeches of old, he roamed the stage and spoke without notes. Cameron’s pitch electrified the Tories in the hall and beyond with YouGov showing that 44% of party members changed their mind during conference week, many in his favour.

Three of the four leadership candidates mimicked Cameron’s approach this week in the hope that some of his magic would rub off on them. Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch all stood alone in the centre of the stage. Only James Cleverly, perhaps realising that novelty is often circular, opted for a more statesmanlike lectern. It didn’t do him any harm. George Osborne, who chaired Cameron’s campaign almost two decades ago, listened to the speeches and declared Cleverly the ‘winner.’

As party chairman in 2019, Cleverly can lay partial claim to the Tories’ greatest electoral victory this century. He’s also the only one of the final four to have served in a great office of state – two, in fact. Falling back on this experience, he told the assembled Tory activists he had completed his apprenticeship and would lead the party with optimism, giving people a reason to vote Conservative ‘with a spring in their step.’ The party faithful, still recovering from their shellacking in July, loved it.

If Cleverly’s success in Birmingham is going to put him in the final two who will be voted on by members, it will most likely be to the detriment of Badenoch. Badenoch’s speech won plaudits in the hall as she wheeled out the disdain for identity politics and zeal for a political scrap that makes so many grassroot Tories admire her. If the next election is to be decided by culture war issues, she is the outstanding choice for leader. But it almost certainly won’t be, and some senior Tories worry that the key issues that drive her politics aren’t the ones that motivate voters - or not enough of them to win an election, at any rate.

The hitherto front-runner, Jenrick, used his moment in the spotlight to tell the party how he would create ‘The New Conservatives’ (a phrase he used sixteen times in his speech). If it seemed as if he was about to echo Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’, he instead started to sound like Rishi Sunak with his five point plan. Jenrick described his own cinque as: securing the border by leaving ECHR; dialling down Net Zero; building more homes; making the state work better; and standing up for the British nation, including with a cut to the foreign aid budget. It sounded like a mini-manifesto for government, but what the party needs right now is a plan to get back there.

Attracting the least comment from the chattering activists was Tugendhat. His pitch was about service: his own service in the military and the service he hopes to do for his party and country. He told the conference that he would deliver a ‘Conservative revolution’, echoing Margaret Thatcher almost half a century ago. The response was warm, but not enthusiastic. Few thought he did poorly, but few also expect him to survive the next ballot of MPs, which is due on the 9th October.

The phoney war stage of this long leadership contest is over and in the next month the decisive steps to choose the next Tory leader - the final MPs votes and all-important members ballot - will take place. After a slow start, the conference gave the four remaining candidates a platform on which to shine. Cleverly, more than any of his rivals, seized the moment.

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